Domino – Movie Review

Even though the movie Domino is 4 years old, I hadn’t seen it due to it’s terrible reviews. Unfortunately I seem to be drawn to terrible movies like flies to shit, so it stuck with me that I’d never seen it until just now.

The movie is the mostly fictionalized story of Domino Harvey (Keira Knightly), the child of a movie star who supposedly gave up modeling to become a bounty hunter. There are some ridiculous things in this movie you could explain away as being mildly possible, considering pretty much every boy tries to learn to use nunchucks and throwing knives at some point it’s not too out there to imagine this woman succeeded in mastering both when she was 12.

The rest of the movie is a typical pulp story about a bail bondsman trying to steal some money and blame it on some patsies, but unfortunately gets wrapped up in the mob and the FBI. It’s straight out of 1995… sadly it was written and filmed in 2005 without any sort of irony.

The implausibility was actually one of the least awful things about this movie, as it turns out, the directing (by Tony Scott, Top Gun, Man On Fire) and editing leave a lot to be desired. In fact the whole movie is probably ruined solely by the editor, who cut in such an odd way with lots of repeating of lines and scenes (sometimes flipped, sometimes in reverse). In fact the editing bothered me so much I’m going to look up his name right now and attach it to this movie. Wow, William Goldenberg and Christian Wagner are to blame. William Goldenberg may have edited some crap like Coyote Ugly and Miami Vice but he also did Heat and Pleasantville. Christian Wagner did movies like Mission: Impossible 2, The Island, and Fast & Furious, but also did Bad Boys, Face/Off, and Spy Game. Maybe editing is not as powerful a position as I assumed, but the movie could have at least been shorter than 2 hours.